Miami’s Best Kept Secret to Student’s Success
The one experience you need to excel in school and life
Picture yourself sitting on the beach with your eyes closed, grabbing sand beside your legs and feeling it escape your fingers, breathing with no haste, and filling your lungs with great energy. Then, you open your eyes and find twelve other strangers feeling the same peace and comfort. You have been sitting on the beach of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, a place with endless stories like yours today.
#TravelAwakensLeaders
Every student is talented and unique in their own way. Not to be overly optimistic, but what’s better is every individuals ability to acquire new skills and ideas through experience. Allapattah, Overtown, and Edgewater are some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods in Miami’s wealth ladder. Thier nearby schools and students don’t possess the most prolific backgrounds or futures, but programs like the Nyah Project are a catapult to the success of some students in these areas.
Nyah Project’s focus on Leadership, Impact, Inclusion, and Purpose collide with the goal of transforming labeled students into purposeful citizens. They achieve this with travel fellowships across the globe - Ghana, Costa Rica, and Nigeria, for example. The high school students across the MDCPS system who have attended one of the last six fellowships have gone up to receive millions in scholarship funding, formed part of prestigious organizations like the Posse Foundation, and even interned in some of the leading companies across the globe, such as Ernst & Young, Bloomberg Media and Bank of America.
This is no coincidence. The goal of every year’s fellowship is to build on the strengths and qualities of the students by opening their eyes to the opportunities beyond what they can see. When visiting other countries, the group spends time learning facts about that countries financial structure, cultural diaspora, and political relationships with global powers. Although that is the ideal situation inside the classroom, intentional meditation on the beach has no replacement.
A common trend between these fellows is they come into the program with a genuine desire to improve their life as imposed by their environments. As they go through the qualification process of the program, they encounter new strategies and goals for themselves and those around them, those who are not accepted as finalists can consider themselves deserving of their most desired goals. For finalists, inevitably their transformation is visibly noticeable within their school setting and familial surroundings.
The least to say is that you are encouraged to apply, share with a student worth taking the leap and donate to the cause of building leaders in Miami’s most vulnerable areas. #TravelAwakensLeaders
~ Adolfo Sirias, 2018 Nyah Project Fellow